Czech writers in Frankfurt wear “Culture in danger” badges

The Frankfurt Book Fair has ended. Czechia was its guest of honour, and 75 Czech writers were visible not only at the exhibition grounds but all over the city. Some of them appeared wearing “Culture in danger” badges, a way for the delegation to draw attention to the situation in Czech culture. The last event of the 78th fair on Sunday evening was writer Kateřina Tučková’s meeting with the Turkish diaspora at a festival of Turkish-German culture.

Tučková told the audience about the deportations of Jews to concentration camps, the postwar expulsion of Germans and mass graves. The host called the German translation of her novel “The Expulsion of Gerta Schnirch” a literary event and suggested making it required reading. “For me, the most valuable thing was learning what we were not taught at school,” the author says.

Badges with a warning

Tučková writes about history more often than about current politics, but at some events she wore a “Culture in danger” badge. “Most members of the Czech delegation agreed that we had to draw attention to the situation in Czech culture somehow,” she explains. At the opening ceremony, writer Radka Denemarková criticized Culture Minister Ota Klempíř of the Motorists party, and the hall responded with stormy applause, while the minister’s own speech was interrupted several times by whistling and shouts of displeasure.

According to Tučková, the minister’s moves threaten live art above all: he dismisses the heads of institutions, such as National Gallery director Alicja Knast, closes and then revives programmes such as the “Czech Library,” and generally destabilizes the scene. The authors do not want to take revenge on the minister with badges, she stresses: “We wanted to show that we are not turned in on our own country, but share problems with colleagues from other countries where similar trends are gaining strength.”

Writer Klára Vlasáková also wore a badge. In her view, it will not harm the standing of Czech literature if the shortcomings of cultural policy are named aloud. Dancer and writer Miřenka Čechová warned about the consequences of the new state cultural policy that the government had just approved: “Independent art will be the first thing to be cut.”

Themes that resonate

Dozens of participants performed every day on the two stages of the Czech pavilion. Zofia Bałdyga, who is from Warsaw, read one of the first poems she wrote in Czech after moving; in 2022 she helped refugees from Ukraine at Prague’s main railway station. Architect and writer Anna Beata Háblová spoke about her personal experience of sexual abuse by a priest, and Štěpánka Jislová’s comic “Heart Attachment” won the Muriel Award.

Alice Horáčková presented her novel “The Broken House,” inspired by the story of her Czech-German family: one ancestor joined the Nazi party and received a Jewish factory from Reinhard Heydrich. The author describes how part of the family ended up on “the wrong side” during the war and paid dearly for it. Asked about the problems of his generation, thirty-three-year-old Marek Torčík, a Magnesia Litera laureate, named the housing shortage, the rise of the far right, the environmental crisis and wars, while Miroslav Hlaučo, author of the bestseller “Summer Sunday,” replied: “I’m from a different generation. I don’t see the world so bipolarly.”

Several discussions were devoted to language. Ninety-year-old Alena Wagnerová, author of biographies of Sidonie Nádherná and Milena Jesenská, writes essays in German. Jaroslav Rudiš, who has just published his second novel in German, is one of the most in-demand members of the delegation: he signs books, performs on the main stage and appears in a TV programme about Otfried Preußler, author of “Krabat.”

Results of the Czech guest appearance

The Czech pavilion was sometimes empty: at a Sunday morning discussion, the delegation’s programme director Martin Krafl himself called out to the public from the stage and drew about two dozen people within a minute. But that was the exception. For preparing the 2023–2027 participation, the previous government of Petr Fiala (ODS) allocated 197 million crowns, and the response was considerable: more than 190 Czech books were translated into German in 2024–2026, and over the past week about 2,500 mentions of the Czech participation appeared in German-language media, the organizers calculated.

The authors are satisfied. Alice Horáčková gave five performances in two days, and Austrian public radio named her novel book of the month. Vratislav Maňák published his essay collection “With Wittgenstein in a Gay Sauna” in Czech and German at the same time; the English rights have already been sold, the book will come out in the US next year, and translations into Slovenian and Italian are under discussion. “I have no doubt that Frankfurt helped,” he says, adding that the guest appearance showed Czechia to be a significant part of the European literary space: “We couldn’t have wished for more.”

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Around Prague, based on reporting by seznamzpravy.cz